Amongst Our Weapons

4 Misdirection

The smell of death is insidious. Spend any time close to a corpse, especially when they’re not fresh, and it gets into your clothes. Which is why I keep a spare jacket and shirt in a dry-cleaning bag in the back of the Asbo. I’ve got quite good at changing in the car, and I only nearly elbowed Danni in the face once getting into the spare shirt.

By the time I was finished the schools were out, and we headed back to Poplar to talk to Megan about her alien. I let Danni do the charm offensive and it worked almost as well as it had with next door’s dog. Soon we were in the living room sitting around the homework table with Megan, aged nine and three quarters, cups of tea, and Megan’s mum hovering in the role of appropriate adult.

‘I normally make her do her homework as soon as she gets in,’ said Megan’s mum, who worked nights as a cleaner for the DLR. ‘That way I know it’s done before I go out.’

She was quick to reassure us that Megan’s big sister would be home from work soon enough to keep an eye on her.

‘It was an alien,’ said Megan – she sounded quite definite and looked quite pleased to be getting out of doing her homework.

‘How did you know it was an alien?’ I asked.

‘It felt like an alien,’ said Megan, and slurped her tea.

Felt, I thought, not looked.

I looked at Danni. She had caught this, too, because she followed up by asking Megan if she could describe how the alien felt.

‘Glowy,’ said Megan. ‘As if she was giving off radiation, and there was a noise.’

‘What kind of noise?’ asked Danni.

‘Like this,’ said Megan, and opened her mouth and sang ‘La’ in a perfect high G. She kept going until she ran out of breath.

‘So like someone singing?’ said Danni.

‘Yeah,’ said Megan. ‘But only if you was an alien.’

Danni asked a few more questions to nail down the time frame and then we left Megan to get on with her homework.

‘She really seems to think it was an alien,’ said Danni once we were out on the walkway.

It had started raining while we were doing the interview and the clouds were low enough to obscure the tops of the dull glass boxes of Canary Wharf.

‘That’s the zeitgeist, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Back in medieval times she would have described it as an angel or a devil or a fairy. Nowadays everything is aliens.’

One of the forensic techs was taking a breather outside David Moore’s flat. She had her hood down and her mask off. Short brown hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat. I gave a friendly wave and got a nod in return.

‘So if it wasn’t an alien?’ asked Danni, who was running through her notes.

‘Maybe a fae of some kind,’ I said. ‘Some of them can have pretty strong vestigia.’

My cousin and fellow apprentice, Abigail, wanted to call a vestigium attached to a living creature an ‘aura’, but I was resistant. I wasn’t about to start talking about people’s auras in public, and definitely not in any official document with my name on it.

‘Could it be an actual angel?’ asked Danni. ‘Or a devil?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

The original Society of the Wise, which was your actual official name for the Folly, had been proudly part of the Enlightenment. God, if he existed, was the ultimate master craftsman who had set the world in motion, with fixed immutable laws, and then left it to get on with things. They saw angels and devils as abstract concepts and held that anything wandering around with a halo, wings or a pitchfork was either an uppity fae, a con man or a mountebank. This attitude had persisted even into the most strident periods of muscular Victorian Christianity, and devout wizards espoused that angels, as manifestations of god, were as above the fae as man was above the beasts that crawl in the dust. Such matters were best left to them, as was ordained by the Church to deal with them.

I was going to have to ask Professor Postmartin, our archivist, to do a sweep of the literature.

‘I don’t know if such things exist,’ I said.

‘You’re not religious?’ asked Danni.

‘Nope,’ I said.

‘You’re an atheist?’ asked Danni, who obviously wasn’t going to get off this topic however hard I hinted.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What about you?’

‘I believe in something but I’m not sure I’m religious.’

Danni snapped her notebook shut. I took the opportunity to saunter over and ask forensics how they were doing.

They thought that there was something written under the fresh paint on the bedroom wall, and they were consulting with friends at the National Gallery as to how to strip the paint without damaging the evidence underneath. I asked them to let me know if there were any symbols hidden under the paint, and they said they would.

I’d hoped that Danni had moved away from the tricky subject of comparative theology, but we hadn’t even got as far as Shadwell when she asked what my parents believed. Luckily I’ve been asked this a lot – not least by Bev – so I’ve got my answer down pat.

‘My mum is game for any branch of Christianity that involves singing and hellfire,’ I said. ‘She likes churches so much she switches to a new one twice a year.’

‘And your dad?’

‘My dad is a practising jazzman,’ I said. ‘He’s eagerly awaiting the true rapture when Duke Ellington rises from the grave and leads a band that will unite Louis Armstrong with Charlie Parker, and Sun Ra lands his flying saucer in Wembley Stadium to lead all the cool cats to the promised land.’

Danni snorted.

‘You’re taking the piss,’ she said.

‘Swear to God I’m not,’ I said. ‘My dad truly believes that if you played a set with Miles Davis, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones and Betty Carter on vocals, the dead would be rising up by the first drum solo, when Philly hit the hi-hat.’

‘Jazz heaven,’ said Danni.

‘Or a jazz zombie apocalypse,’ I said. ‘You decide.’

‘Funny, right,’ said Danni. ‘But if you don’t think it was an alien, what if it turns out to be an actual angel. Proper angel. A messenger of God.’

‘Then I expect you to get their details when you take the statement,’ I said.

‘I’m serious,’ said Danni.

‘So am I.’

Danni probably would have persisted but I got a call from the duty officer at Richmond Borough, who notified me that there’d been a break-in at Althea Moore’s house and did I want to attend. I said I did and, foolishly, turned right across Southwark Bridge in the hope that the traffic would be less awful on the other side of the river.

It probably was less awful. It’s just that it was still pretty awful.

It took us over an hour to get Richmond to find the response officer, PC Tiffany Walvoord again, standing outside Althea’s house, tapping her feet and checking her watch.

‘My mistake,’ she said as we approached, ‘was coming back on shift the next day.’

‘Shifts,’ said Danni. ‘I remember shifts. Do you remember shifts, Peter?’

‘Luxury,’ I said. ‘In my day we had to scavenge our refs off whatever was left at the crime scene.’

‘Funny,’ said Tiffany. ‘Is this one of your cases?’

The answer was yes – judging by the hole in the door where Althea Moore’s Yale lock was supposed to be.

‘Someone knocked out the lock with magic,’ I said, and let Danni have a look.

‘Is there a signare?’ she asked.

You can often tell who’s done a spell by the distinctive vestigia they leave behind – this is called their signare. It’s a bit like handwriting, and just as prone to misinterpretation if you don’t pay attention.

While there was definitely still a vestigium clinging to the hole, it seemed confused, murky and very noisy. I’d have said it was done by a newbie if I hadn’t known that that particular spell wasn’t something you picked up overnight. Not if you want to pop the lock neatly. Otherwise, you might as well knock down the door with a battering ram or an impello spell – which is the magical equivalent.

I said there wasn’t one I could recognise, and we went in to interview Althea.

‘They stole my ring,’ she said as soon as she saw us.

The spring cleaning was obviously finished, and Althea was sitting cross-legged on her bed dressed in a pink satin pyjama top and blue tracksuit bottoms – her hair falling loose around her face.

‘Why don’t you tell us what happened?’ asked Danni, and readied her notebook to show she was serious.

‘Well I’d just said goodbye to that other policeman, the posh one,’ said Althea. ‘And I’d knackered myself getting the flat ready.’

‘Ready for who?’ asked Danni.

‘For me,’ said Althea. ‘I wanted a clean flat.’

Obviously, I thought, but why now? Why just after your ex’s visit?

‘Did David leave you feeling dirty?’ I asked.

Althea flinched at the question and gave me a nasty look, but sometimes being socially transgressive is what policing is all about.

‘No!’ she said. ‘No, God, no. What are you thinking?’

‘I think what my colleague is trying to ask,’ said Danni, slipping smoothly into the role of reasonable female cop, ‘is whether David Moore’s visit led to your decision to spring clean, or had you already planned to do it previously.’

Althea gave us a very understandable What the fuck? look, but answered anyway.

‘I was always planning to do it,’ she said. ‘But it was such a disgrace when David came round that it kind of pushed me over the edge. What has this got to do with someone stealing my ring?’

Danni left me to answer that question.

‘We’re just trying to clarify the timeline,’ I said, because I was wondering whether you were displaying an instinctive reaction to a supernatural something that I refuse to call an aura is not something I want taken down in evidence.

Danni leant forwards, angling slightly away from me to make clear her disapproval of her strangely rude and irrelevant colleague.

‘So you lay down for a nap,’ she said. ‘Was the door locked?’

‘Yes,’ said Althea, as were the back door and the windows, because she had been living in London for the last ten years and knew better than to leave her flat unlocked – thank you very much.

‘So the ring was stolen while you were having a nap?’ asked Danni. ‘Was anything else taken?’

‘No,’ said Althea. ‘Just the ring. There’s two hundred quid in the kitchen drawer and …’ She looked around her flat for potential valuables – it was a meagre haul. ‘My laptop. So they must have come here specially for the ring – right?’

‘It seems so,’ said Danni. ‘So where was the ring?’

Althea instinctively put her hand on her chest – just below her throat.

‘It was on a chain,’ she said.

‘Around your neck?’ asked Danni, to be sure.

‘I always wear it,’ she said. ‘Even in bed. Silly, really.’

‘So whoever stole it took it from around your neck?’ said Danni. ‘While you were asleep.’

Althea nodded glumly.

No, she hadn’t taken a sleeping pill, or had a drink or three. She’d had a cup of tea, read for a bit, drawn the curtains and gone to sleep.

Getting the chain over Althea’s head without waking her seemed unlikely, but if the thief had cut the chain – wouldn’t they leave the chain behind? Especially if the ring was the main target.

‘I have trouble getting it off sometimes,’ said Althea. ‘The chain gets tangled in my hair.’

‘Why do you wear it all the time, then?’ I asked, although I probably shouldn’t have.

‘I don’t know,’ said Althea. ‘I just always do.’

Danni turned and frowned at me before turning back to Althea and asking if she remembered anything unusual happening.

‘Like what?’ asked Althea.

‘Like your sleep being disturbed, dreams, nightmares?’ said Danni, showing that she had been paying attention to Nightingale’s ‘witness perception displacement’ lecture. Otherwise known as the ‘weirdness filter’, in which witnesses and victims of Falcon events often rationalise things that they don’t understand into things they do. Even if, like little Megan, what they understand is shape-shifting aliens. I blame Doctor Who for that.

‘I had a nightmare,’ said Althea brightly.

‘What was it about?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Althea. ‘It was a nightmare – I woke up in a fright but I don’t know why.’

‘Was that before or after you noticed the ring was missing?’ asked Danni.

‘Before, I think,’ said Althea. ‘I woke up and went to the loo and then back to bed.’

Something in the rote way Althea said the phrase ‘and then back to bed’ caught my attention.

‘I know this sounds strange,’ I said. ‘But memory, especially between sleeps, can be a bit funny. So do you remember anything odd about your trip to the loo?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like anything unusual,’ I said.

‘Like what?’ she asked again.

I didn’t have a good answer, so I suggested that we reconstructed her journey from her bed to the loo. I think she would have liked to have told us to piss off but had concluded that humouring us was the fastest route to getting us out the door.

So she lay down on the bed and then, like a child in a primary school play, mimed waking up, pulling back an invisible duvet and rolling out of bed. She headed for the bathroom at the back of the flat.

‘Hold it there a moment,’ I said.

Basement flats were gloomy at the best of times, but this one had heavy curtains – the kind used by people who could only sleep in complete darkness.

‘Did you turn a light on?’ I asked.

Althea thought about it and said she was pretty sure she didn’t.

‘I think it was already on,’ she said.

‘Do you often go to sleep with the light on?’

Althea chuckled.

‘Not when I’m sober,’ she said. ‘Even at night I have to draw the curtains to keep out the light pollution.’ Althea stopped and stared at me for a moment. ‘Oh shit,’ she said. ‘You think they were already in here, with me, when I went to the loo.’

I said it was a possibility, and after we’d got Althea calmed down again we walked her through her movements. But she was adamant that she saw or heard nothing amiss. That she had gone back to bed unmolested. Although she admitted that she couldn’t know for sure whether she was still wearing the ring around her neck.

I made a note to point forensics at the light switches in case the intruder had got careless and left a print.

We assured Althea that we were taking her safety very seriously and asked whether there was someone she could stay with for a few nights.

‘You think they might come back?’ said Althea, getting alarmed again.

‘Best to be sure,’ said Danni.

I left Danni to organise that while I went outside and called Nightingale.

‘And you’re sure about the lack of a coherent signare?’ he said.

It had started drizzling again so I was sitting in the Asbo.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you think it was deliberately obscured – as a forensic countermeasure?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ he said. ‘But some practitioners can have a confusingly murky signare. Particularly if they had a varied magical education.’

He hadn’t seen anyone lurking on the street either, coming or going.

‘I like to think I haven’t got so old that my basic counter-surveillance training has atrophied,’ he said.

I asked him whether he’d had a chance to handle the ring that morning.

‘It was most definitely enchanted,’ said Nightingale. ‘And I agree with you about Miss Moore’s reluctance to part with hers, although as Abdul would no doubt say, “correlation is not causation”.’

‘Could you tell what it was enchanted to do?’

‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘But then my contact was brief. Miss Moore was quite insistent that I hand it back. One thing of interest – the ring was far too heavy to be made of silver. At a guess I’d say it was platinum.’

‘Does that have any magical connotations?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Nightingale. ‘Iron, steel and silver were always preferred for enchantment. I understand that platinum is a difficult metal to work with, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Merely beyond my skills – such as they are.’

‘Could this be something to do with the Sons of Wayland?’ I asked.

They’d been the metal-bashing arm of British wizardry since before the Folly was founded. I had one of their World War Two era battle staffs and Nightingale had taught me basic enchantment. I’d been working on an armband, less conspicuous than a staff, when I’d been suspended the year before. Perhaps, I thought, I should start the project up again.

‘Peter?’ said Nightingale.

‘Sir?’

‘I said that we have to do some digging in the library,’ he said. ‘And, Peter?’

‘Yes?’

‘Try not to get distracted.’

‘No, sir,’ I said.

We wrapped up so I could concentrate on my notes. I was about halfway through those when the duty officer from Richmond Borough marched up and rapped on my windscreen. Being an inspector, she didn’t have to wait for me to answer and instead she immediately opened the passenger door and slipped inside. Her high-viz jacket was beaded with moisture and she had resources on her mind.

‘When am I getting my people back?’ she asked, gesturing at where PC Walvoord and a couple of response officers were loitering in the half stairwell – out of the drizzle. Response officers being such a rare commodity these days that there were bound to be shouts she needed them for piling up.

I sighed and started negotiating. Her name was Samantha Milocab and she was one of those fast-tracked graduates that had arrived at their rank already well versed in management-speak. So when I told her that I was waiting for Belgravia MIT to deploy the appropriate personnel to secure the scene in accordance with standard procedure, she just gave me a weary look.

‘Tell your boss,’ she said, ‘if he wants my officers here any longer he’s going to have to cough up the overtime money himself.’

See, this is what happens when these graduates fall under the influence of the rank and file. They start getting ideas below their station – worst of all possible worlds. Luckily, at least from my point of view, detective constables – however ambitious they may be – do not make these kind of administrative decisions. So it was with a light heart that I called up Nightingale again and made it his problem.

‘I see,’ he said after I’d explained. ‘Please inform Inspector Milcocab that we’re taking budgetary responsibility for her team’s deployment outside the scene, but ask her if she could supervise until I can get there.’

I was stunned – Nightingale had just used the phrase budgetary responsibility. Talk about bad influences. I was going to have to start watching my language around him.

‘When will that be?’ I asked, knowing that that would be the first thing Milocab asked me.

‘We’ve removed the body and I’ve finished my supplementary sweep,’ he said. ‘We can leave the routine actions here to Stephanopoulos. You and Danni might as well go off duty and we can have an early start tomorrow.’

I came home to a candlelit dinner – which was unexpected.

Beverley had cleared all her coursework off the gateleg table in the living room and laid it out with napkins, two types of knife and fork, the china plates that Tyburn had given her for her birthday and had stayed in their box since then and, of course, a pair of candles mounted in carved wooden candlesticks.

Beverley hustled out of the kitchen with her hair wrapped in a scarf and wearing one of my barbecue aprons over the bulge. She shooed me back into the living room – claiming that she didn’t want to spoil the surprise. More likely, she didn’t want me to see that she’d managed to use every single pot and pan we owned, as well as spreading a fine layer of ingredients over every single flat surface. Including the pages of whatever cookery book she happened to be using.

‘It occurred to me,’ she said as she thrust a bottle of Special Brew into my hands, ‘that I hadn’t cooked you a dinner for a while.’

‘You did beans on toast last week,’ I said, and then wished I hadn’t when Beverley scowled at me. ‘It was very nice beans on toast – you added butter to the beans and everything.’

Which went down as well you might expect.

I went to have a shower and change. As soon as word got around that Bev was pregnant I’d received a lot of unasked-for advice – much of it from people who’d only ever experienced the process from the inside. But amongst all the things I’d been warned to expect – food cravings, mood swings and visits from earlier incarnations – dinner for two had not featured.

Since Bev was making an effort, I dressed smart casual and stayed calm when the kitchen smoke alarm sounded. I heard Bev swearing, the back door opening and then the smoke alarm’s ear-splitting pips doppler down the length of the garden, followed by a crack as it hit a planter and went silent.

Beverley once extinguished a five-appliance fire at Covent Garden. She did it in under sixty seconds while me and a terrified German family watched. Apparently she got a bollocking from her older sisters Tyburn and Fleet, but I always got the impression they were secretly proud of her.

She still gets Christmas cards from the German family.

I didn’t know what she was cooking but it smelt good.

It was good, cajun steak with butter, and much better than I would have made. I’m a utilitarian cook, bish-bash-bosh meals made with minimum fuss. And presentation … what’s that?

Beverley had taken the opportunity to slice the steak, rare enough to send to a vet, rub in spices and then marinated it in a butter peppercorn sauce. It was hot enough that neither of us felt the need to break out the Tan Rosie’s hot sauce – actually I wouldn’t have suggested that anyway, because I don’t have a death wish.

‘We should go,’ I said after I’d chased the last slice around the plate.

‘Go where?’ asked Beverley, and burped loudly. She leant back in her chair and folded her hands on the bulge.

‘New Orleans,’ I said and belched back. ‘Go pay our respects to the Mississippi – see if anyone’s at home. Sample some cooking – listen to some jazz.’

‘You don’t like jazz,’ said Beverley.

‘I don’t mind the old-fashioned stuff – in the right venue.’

‘What if the twins don’t like jazz?’

‘We could take Abigail to help with the twins.’

‘Oh yeah, because that’s not a recipe for disaster in any way whatsoever.’

‘Or something,’ I said.

‘You know I appreciate you don’t bring your work home,’ she said. ‘But what the fuck is going on?’

I sighed and cleared the plates. We were having fruit for pudding – which was just as well because I didn’t think the kitchen could have survived anything more complicated. I brought out the fruit bowl, another Special Brew for me, and the jug of tomato juice that had been chilling in the fridge for Bev.

‘It’s not work,’ I said. ‘Not exactly anyway. It’s about aliens.’

Beverley gave me an incredulous look and started to laugh.

‘You think aliens are funny?’

‘Yes, no, maybe,’ she said. ‘But that’s not why I’m laughing. I was expecting a different conversation, that’s all. Aliens, right. What about them?’

‘If we define “alien” as something that has evolved separately from earth’s biosphere,’ I said, ‘rather than grey guys in flying saucers, do you think it’s possible something like that might be active here, right now?’

‘“Here” meaning London?’

‘“Here” meaning the world.’

‘What brought this on?’

Standing in a room where a mechanical computer did weird shit to the fabric of space-time and thinking, just for a moment, that something huge and alien was looking at me.

Before we blew it up.

And today a little girl was adamant she’d seen an alien visiting David Moore’s house and I’d dismissed it as a modern interpretation of the ordinary supernatural. But should I have?

And when did the supernatural become so ordinary?

‘The whales think there’s something living in the North Sea,’ said Beverley. ‘But it might be a giant squid.’

I’d seen Beverley talking to whales before, or rather shouting at them in an attempt to warn a pair of bottlenose whales from swimming too far up the Thames and getting themselves stranded. When I asked why the pair wanted to swim up the river, Bev said they were looking to launch a social media career. But I don’t think she was serious.

‘Aren’t they sure about whatever it is in the North Sea?’ I asked, because I figured if anyone would know what was lurking under the sea it would be the whales.

‘They might be,’ said Beverley. ‘But my spoken whale is not that brilliant. I’m mostly limited to basic noun–verb combinations – “food here” “danger there”. Abstract concepts like “alien” and “non-alien” are a bit beyond me. And that’s assuming a non-tool-using aquatic mammal is going to have the same language equivalencies as we do.’

I love it when Beverley talks science – it gets me all hot and bothered.

‘Giant squids are pretty alien,’ I said.

‘Not to another giant squid,’ said Beverley.

I helped Beverley up the stairs to the bathroom and made sure she had her tea and her waterproof Kindle on the bath table and then sat on the footstool to watch her. You could see the water rippling as she altered its temperature to suit herself. Her bulge rising like a mythical island from the surface of the water.

‘What do you see when you look at me like that?’ she asked.

I didn’t have a good answer, so I went for honesty instead.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Everything. That’s what I see – everything.’

‘You think I’m that huge, then?’ she said. ‘I am woman, I contain multitudes. All shall look upon me and despair.’

‘Shall I compare thee to a giant squid,’ I said. ‘Thou art more lovely and less tentacled.’

Bev smiled and shook her head.

‘Go and do the washing-up.’ And when I hesitated, she said, ‘I cooked, you wash up.’

So downstairs I went, leaving my beloved with Gravitational Systems of Groundwater Flow by József Tóth, to tackle the kitchen. Which was even worse than I’d imagined.

I mean, how do you get an egg whisk covered in grease while making butter sauce? After all, it’s not a butter whisk.

I’d just got the surfaces regulated and the small stuff in the dishwasher when I heard scratching at the kitchen door. I opened it to find a talking fox waiting for me on the patio with an envelope in its mouth. When it saw me, it trotted forwards and dropped the envelope at my feet.

‘Special delivery,’ it said. ‘Handed in at the Seven Sisters dead drop.’

I popped back into the kitchen and picked up a pair of nitrile gloves.

The fox sat back on its haunches and waited expectantly while I pulled on my gloves and opened the envelope. I always open strange packages from the bottom or the side. There’s only so many ways you can booby-trap a letter and in most of them the trigger mechanism relies on you opening the flap. This piece of fox post was a flat white standard envelope of the type used to send birthday cards. Inside was a single sheet of printer-quality paper with a message written across it in familiar handwriting. There were no foreign substances coating the edges, and when I gave it an experimental sniff it smelt only of paper with a hint of fox.

I read the message by the light from the kitchen, then I went back inside and placed it carefully on a clean plate. I opened the fridge and found one of the emergency snack containers, marked with a fox sticker. The fox perked up as I brought the container out with me and crouched down in front of it.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Jigsaw Alpha,’ said the fox. ‘But most people call me Sally.’ It eyed the container in my hands. ‘Cheese puffs?’

‘Was the dead drop under observation?’ I asked.

‘That’s an operational matter,’ said Sally. ‘And need to know only.’

‘Oh,’ I said and went as if to stand up. ‘No matter.’

‘No,’ said Sally quickly. ‘It’s not monitored – it’s only an emergency drop and checked once a day.’

I settled back down with the container displayed to its best advantage.

‘When was the letter found?’

‘Halfway through the first prance,’ said Sally. I knew better than to ask for a clock time, and in any case I had a rough translation primer pinned to the fridge with a magnet. ‘It was there when we made the routine check. No smell or spoor, so definitely not a fox or fae.’

I opened the container and gave Sally a cheese puff, which she ate in a couple of happy bites. I closed the container and she gave me the big eyes, but I’m made of sterner stuff.

‘I want you to stick around. I may have a message for you to take back,’ I told her, and waved the container for emphasis. Sally nodded enthusiastically.

‘Roger that,’ she said, and then after a hesitation, shyly, ‘Can I go see the Bev?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But don’t annoy her.’

Sally scampered past me and into the house. I followed her in, closed the door and hunted out my scene-of-crime kit and a plastic evidence bag. While I did that I speed-dialled Nightingale.

‘We have a problem,’ I said when he picked up. ‘Lesley just sent me a message.’